4 ms·
Selling binaries is a something even GPL foresees. You can view telemetry as the price: if the product is free, you are the product. This has become a predomina
by riedel 4y ago
Selling binaries is a something even GPL foresees. You can view telemetry as the price: if the product is free, you are the product. This has become a predominant business modell since most users seem unwilling to pay for sth that you can get for free. Sure MS won't need the money but I guess the dev team will probably have to still provide such kind of value. What would IMHO conflict with free software is however not the presence of telemetry but the lacking presence of it in the public sources (if that is true at all, often this even has to be removed by community forks). Is telemetry actually so intrasparent in the official sources?
- hulitu 4y ago> This has become a predominant business modell since most users seem unwilling to pay for sth that you can get for free. I paid for my Android phone. Google is still collecting every piece of my life and my family's.
- dymk 4y agoYou paid for the physical hardware. You’re free to install AOSP on it if you’d like.
- epicide 4y agoYou bought the car. You're free to put whatever fuel in it that you like, but anything other than our own Super Xtreme CarFuel Plus is not supported (and will likely total your vehicle). A bit more seriously: there are shades of grey. Just because they gave you something for what you paid doesn't mean it was a) fair, nor b) what was (effectively) advertised. Legalese around "you really just bought X" doesn't necessarily put everything in the clear. i.e. when you buy an Android phone, it seems reasonable for people to expect that to come with a functioning Android-based OS. Just because you can install a different OS on it doesn't mean the default one isn't subject to criticism.
- brewdad 4y agoI see it something akin to the smart tv market where you buy the hardware but it also collects and uses data about everything you watch. The data collection aspect allows them to sell you that tv for less than they would if it were a "dumb" tv.
- II2II 4y agoAs far as I can tell, most people are not free to install AOSP on hardware they have paid for since the bootloader is locked. Even those who purchase hardware where the bootloader can be unlocked, it takes much deeper technical knowledge to install a third party OS than, say, a third party OS on a PC. And that is assuming someone else built the OS for you.
- akagusu 4y agoNobody is free to install AOSP unless you want to lose your warranty.